


the real world (and you)

by trell (qunlat)



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Episode Related, Episode: s01e01 Pilot, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-20
Updated: 2012-11-20
Packaged: 2017-11-19 02:30:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/568053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A cyberpunk AU of Elementary, written for the <a href="http://sapphisms.livejournal.com/2600.html">my dear watson ficathon</a>. <i>Sherlock is not the first ractive addict with more implants than he can handle that she has helped through psychological withdrawal. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	the real world (and you)

His name is Sherlock Holmes, he is forty years old, and Joan is to be his sober companion. 

“He’s a very talented hacker,” the elder Holmes’ secretary warns her when they discuss Joan’s terms. Half of the room in which Joan is seated has been transformed into an airy high-rise office somewhere in Japan; Mr. Holmes’ secretary is half-way across the world, but the woman sitting with her hands immaculately folded on a mahogany desk appears perfectly solid. “Mr. Holmes advises you be cautious, Miss Watson.”

“I can handle him,” Joan says then, with certainty. Sherlock is not the first ractive addict with more implants than he can handle that she has helped through psychological withdrawal. 

“Mr. Holmes hopes that you can,” the secretary says, stone-faced, and cuts off the call; her office fades, leaves Watson with her usual projected overlay of light walls and tasteful paintings.

She goes to bed the night before she’s supposed to get him out of rehab scrolling through the medical file she’s been uploaded by the secretary, looking through his list of augmentations. A full ractive projection map implanted under the skin; an internal network adapter so advanced that it can hook him into the global networks from virtually anywhere on the planet, which—a quick search tells her—is worth more than Joan currently makes in a year. A dozen others.

She has dealt with patients who have had this many implants, but usually they had so many to make up for the failings of each cheaper, slowly degrading component. Each of Sherlock’s is expensive, high-functioning, and well-serviced; and, if his history is anything to go by, he knows how to use each to its full potential.

Joan Watson can handle Sherlock Holmes, she tells herself, but she begins to suspect this will not be an average recovery.

—

“I work as a consultant for the NYPD,” he tells her, and Joan Watson raises her eyebrows. Certainly someone like Sherlock must be an asset; but she wonders if they know about his history, about the descent into fantasy, about the dozens of augmentations. She supposes they must at least know about the existence of the latter, if he’s ever been inside a precinct; there’s scanners at every door, and firewalls, and even electromagnetic pulse generators in case of a major emergency.

“Who do you consult for?” she asks, and watches as Sherlock bounces around the brownstone. There are no projections here, imposed locks on nonrealities; for a recovering addict the temptation to slip into fantasy is too great, and the property (and its projectors) belong to Sherlock’s father.

“Captain Gregson. A man of relative intelligence and a long-time colleague. We worked together for Scotland Yard.” Sherlock makes a minuscule motion with his fingers, and suddenly Watson sees a file with a photograph of a man—slightly heavy and sagging with age but not unpleasant, dressed in heavy dark wool. 

She’s more interested in the fine control Sherlock has over his network implants, though; no obvious handwave or spoken words required, just a twitch of the fingers to get it to do what he wants.

If she didn’t know better (and, oh, she does), Joan would wonder how someone so intelligent and talented fell into the trap of ractive addiction.

“I see,” she says, and chases after Sherlock as he shuttles out the door without a second glance. 

—

Sherlock takes in corpses unblinkingly, unflinching but not unaffected, like he’s seen too many but hasn’t lost the sense of seeing humans inside the white chalk lines. 

“Sometimes I hate it when I’m right,” he says, and walks forward into the safe room. 

Sherlock crouches and stares at the woman contorted on the floor in a pool of her own blood, and Joan wonders what searches he’s making, what notes he’s attaching to her name in his personal file system (if he is.) She wonders what he sees.

At one point, she sees him hover a hand over the blood pool, and realizes with a start that he’s sampling for nanites, performing a test on his own that CSU pays specialists thousands of dollars to do. 

By the time CSU arrives on the scene Sherlock has a distant look on his face, like he’s either cogitating or Googling. “What are you thinking?” Joan asks.

“I don’t like to state my hypotheses until there is a firm ground in evidence,” Sherlock says.

“The police think Doctor Mantlo is responsible,” Joan says. She’s running a search on the side, looking up the man’s history. A successful psychologist, employed at a nearby general hospital; not brilliant, but not bad. 

“The police think lots of things. It’s adorable,” Sherlock snarks.

They follow Gregson and CSU out the door.

—

Peter Saldua is old-fashioned and he made his recordings on an antique cellular phone. One of the anti-lens-use radicals, she supposes, and it’s a good thing, too, because if he’d used and lost his lenses they would have never found the recordings at all.

After, when Saldua is behind bars and Sherlock has made arrangements to pay for the damages to her car (he makes the transactions from the awful ratty chair in the brownstone’s main room, blinking carefully and barely twitching his fingers) Joan projects the baseball game in the center of the upstairs room. “It’s boring,” Sherlock complains.

“Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t awesome, okay?” she retorts, and clenches her hands into fists with anticipation as the latest teammate strides up to bat. 

Later, when they go out to dinner and he helps her with her coat, she wonders, suddenly, if her words echo his reasons for his addiction.

She doesn’t ask, though, and Sherlock hails them a cab so subtly she doesn’t even see how he signals the network.


End file.
